06 November 2011 8:16 PM

Now we are being told that pupils in state secondary schools will be made to read classic novels rather than the - I suppose they will call it 'accessible' - popular trash to which they have become accustomed. It is the idea of that nice, civilized Mr Gove - and I wish him luck. But I am afraid his aspiration will not succeed, for the very good reason that there are few teachers in state education competent to teach English literature.

They can teach agit-prop featuring Mr Bean or sentimental socialism as represented in novels such as Kes. Harry Potter is more their style. But if we are to talk about classic novels, then we must notice books such as The Mayor of Casterbridge; A Tale of Two Cities; Adam Bede and Middlemarch. Most teachers I've come across in the state system have never even read Middlemarch - one of the greatest of all English novels - let alone shown themselves capable of teaching it.

This problem is replicated throughout the curriculum when any courageous man such as the good Mr Gove starts talking about "back to basics." Because the awful truth is that very few teachers know the basics. We have had three generations of comprehensively failing state education resulting in something very much like the blind leading the blind.

This awfulness in education is like the awfulness that prevails on public housing estates where, in many families, no one has worked for thirty years.

It is a fantasy to expect teachers who are not themselves literate - what we used to call "well-read" - to teach English literature. The basics are not being learnt for the simple reason that the basics are not being taught. Even the Education Department admits that 40% of our children leave school after eleven years of full-time, free, state education, unable to read, write or count properly.

This points to the overwhelming failure of state education as it has been conducted since the late 1960s, the virtual abolition of the grammar schools and the redefinition of teaching and learning as matters of personal opinion and self-expression. But a child doesn't have a self to express until he has imbibed things to form that self.

You are what you eat. That goes for the mind as well as the body. For these thirty or forty years our schoolchildren have been sold short - given the intellectual equivalent of junk food - effectively deprived, all in the name of a political ideology which despises excellence.

Comprehensive education is, of course, anti-elitisim. It is a form of levelling. And levellling is always levelling down.

The necessary and sufficient conditions for our children to be introduced to classic literature, or even be able to spell correctly and write grammatically, are that the present failed system of state education be abolished - including, naturally, all the useless, ideologically- motivated local educational authorities -and individual schools given over to be managed by teachers, and especially headteachers, who have shown that they can do the job

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The protesters are still encamped outside St Paul’s. I have listened to their speeches when they have been so politely interviewed by the BBC, an organisation which, it must be said, shows more respect to your individual anarchist than it shows to anyone else interrogated over the air waves. And why are protesters allowed to get away with simply giving their Christian – sorry, that was a bad piece of anti-diversity, Mullen – first name? They wouldn’t let a politician or even one of their beloved left-wing clergymen (is there any other sort?) get away without giving his surname.

But what exactly are the protesters protesting about? Nothing I’ve heard makes me think that they are saying anything other than that some people are richer than others – and it’s not fair. “It’s not fair! – it is the cry of every child in the infants’ class. And so a competent teacher will agree and say, “Yes, life isn’t fair. It never was and it never will be. You’ve just got to work hard and get on with it.”

Work? The word is English as a foreign language to the gang outside St Paul’s who, so far as we can tell, are living on either daddy’s misplaced generosity or state benefits – or, of course, since the human heart is greedy beyond measure, both. They claim to be against capitalism. There is their big banner CAPITALISM IS CRISIS. Do they think we don’t know that? All political systems involve crisis. In fact in Marxism, the preferred philosophy – insofar as this lumpen band of professional narcissists are capable of philosophising – crisis is built into the system, based as it is on the dialectic which makes disagreement and class war not only necessary but desirable. Have they never read Das Kapital? If it comes to that, have they even read Noddy Goes to Toytown?

Capitalism is a flawed and imperfect way of conducting economic life. But, as Churchill said of democracy, it’s bad, but it’s the best we’ve got. All our ways of conducting ourselves are flawed because we ourselves are flawed. Or, please, will someone write an answer to this blog which includes the claim that he is perfect?

The main alternative to capitalism remains socialism. And wherever socialism has been tried it has led at best to economic stagnation and widespread poverty. Of course it has generally progressed to incompetent rule by a privileged and corrupt elite, to the bureaucratisation of society – with all its attendant inefficiency and over-regulation – and usually to the gulag and mass murder as well. It is a pity that the protesters don’t read anything, otherwise they might learn the truth about the history of socialism, communism and the attempt at levelling since the French Revolution and through the monstrous genocides of Stalin and Mao who between them murdered 100million of their own people in the name of socialism.

Let me give you a tip: whenever you hear the cry, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” listen out keenly for the next sound, because it will be the sound of the tumbrels.

There is this crazy idea that communism/socialism is based on a sense of fairness and kindness of heart. This view is a particular superstition among clergymen. But socialism is not based on those desirable qualities. It is based on control and repression. Eliot warned us against “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” That is the fatuous fantasy of society’s sentimental socialists, especially in the church and in the media: that you can regulate to produce goodness

There is some excuse for the media. Most journalists never attended their Confirmation classes. But there is no excuse for churchmen, for we have been taught the reality of Original Sin from our youth up. Original Sin is not some sort of supernatural perversity. It is simply the way it is with us. Human nature. As St Paul – now there’s irony for you! - puts it: We don’t do the things we know we should; and we do the things we know we shouldn’t. And that is true of everyone, whether he claims to be a capitalist a socialist or of any other political persuasion, or none.

Capitalism is simply the least worst way of going on available to us. It works with rather than against the grain of human nature. Entrepreneurship is good for you! Make a decent mousetrap in order to enrich yourself by its sales and you will rid a million households of vermin. Of course there are people who are richer than others. There always were. And, as someone said, “The poor are always with you.” But in those countries which have hitched their wagon to the capitalist caravan, there is everywhere and always a better general standard, and certainly more opportunity, for people to rise out of poverty than there was or is in any socialist/communist regime.

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03 November 2011 3:56 PM

I have become convinced that long ago an edict went out to all the producers who devise the schedule for that tax-funded totalitarian rubbish heap called Radio Four that not one half hour must pass without the eruption of a blast of pop music.

It doesn’t matter what the programme is: Today, Woman’s Hour, The World at One, PM – anything. This morning they were talking seriously – seriously, can you believe? – about Oxford’s poor reputation for producing these noises. In a once-better world, Oxford was regarded for something else.

It’s not as if there is a shortage of this audible filth on other wavelengths: I have lost count of the number of radio stations which play nothing else day and night. But this is only the occasion and not the reason for my complaint. If plebs and the elite intelligentsia in the BBC who like this stuff want it, then let them have it. But let them keep it in its proper place – in the same way that the privy used to be built as far away from the dining room as possible. Radio Four boasts itself a repository of intelligence. It cannot do so if it allows itself to be so contaminated by what is worthless – and not just worthless but often corrupting and degrading. The word 'nihilistic' springs to mind.

But no, my complaint is that they insist on calling this rubbish 'music' without the adjective 'popular' – or perhaps some more suitable and accurate adjective such as 'trash.'

That’s what used to happen. A couple of decades ago people knew that 'music' meant Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and the other great masters. Decent allowance was made for something called 'light music' which meant Lehar, Johann Strauss, Glen Miller, Frank Sinatra and songs from the shows – much of this sort of thing is delightful in its own way but not to be confused at any price with the works of the musical masters.

Worse, there is the BBC’s adulation of the noise merchants – especially when they are dying or dead. When a real musician dies (Robert Simpson, for example) there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of disc-jockeys. I think a disc-jockey is a person who has mastered the rare accomplishment of being able to place a gramophone record on a turntable and talk nonsense while he is doing so. There was such a disc-jockey called, I seem to remember, John Peel. When he died some years ago, the report of his demise took up the first twenty-five minutes on the main evening news. Michael Jackson’s decline and defunction took them three days to report. Amy Winehouse was the most recent example of the Beeb’s loving addiction to pop.

I’m not even going to start on about the contradictions involved in the BBC’s blatant commitment – rivaling even that of The Guardian - to all things pacific and non-sexist, which yet plays rap music which is violent – especially in its 'lyrics' – but what’s lyrical about them? – towards women.

I repeat: I don’t want to see the noise banned. Just keep it off the radio station to which one might turn expecting to hear the news summary or some intelligent talk programme.

Tonight on BBC Four, Simon Russell Beale will present the first programme in his series on The Symphony. That’s music. The other stuff is something else altogether and should be kept in its proper quarantine.

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26 October 2011 12:36 PM

The Bishop of London has said that it is time for the protesters outside St Paul’s to move on. He is surely right to demand this. The presence of this rabble is losing that famous capitalist enterprise, the cathedral, £22,500 each day in income because its closure means it cannot charge each visitor £14.50 apiece entrance fee. No entrepreneurial enterprise such as St Paul’s can afford to lose money at that rate for very long.

And rich capitalists in the City and beyond are reconsidering their willingness to continue to contribute financially to a cathedral governed so badly. A capitalist enterprise, such as St Paul’s, which depends so profoundly on the support of capitalist entrepreneurs, can hardly afford to alienate these, its best friends. One suspects that, among the Dean and Canons, a mixture of panic and dismay has set in. Let us see if the Bishop can ride to the rescue them. Moreover – and some may think this a far greater failing –: those whose method of governing the cathedral is by closing it down, are denying worshippers the opportunity to say their prayers in that holy place.

It is written, “My house shall be a house of prayer” – but ye have turned it into a closed shop

Hence St Paul’s Dean and Canons, and now the Bishop himself, have stepped in and, (as Rob Marshall, the cathedral’s genial and fair-minded official spokesman has repeated many times) adjudged that their initial decision to welcome the protesters and ask the police to “move on” was a disastrous error of judgement.

In any case, these protesters are an anomalous bunch of slick and hypocritical part-timers. Many leave the hideous eyesore of their camp each evening to return home, to examine their emails – without which they would be unable to continue their own capitalist enterprises. Some of them perhaps enjoy a hot bath, one or two of them might even shave before checking their personal share prices on the Internet. They no doubt all recharge those well-known capitalist devices - their mobile phones and blackberries – without which they would be powerless of course to conduct their adolescent, pretend anti-capitalist revolution.

The Bishop of London is quite right to say that the protesters should move on. It is a pity that he did not add the admonition to both them and to his Dean and Canons to grow up.

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21 October 2011 12:53 PM

I am very much looking forward to tomorrow’s speech by Ann Widdecombe in which she will criticise our government for its double standards in withdrawing aid from countries which persecute homosexuals while at the same time turning a blind eye to those realms around the world which persecute Christians. Ms Widdecombe says, 'You have a better chance of earnest representation if you are a hedgehog than if you are a persecuted Christian.'

I am too old and cynical to expect anything better of governments, of whatever hue. But you might think that the leaders of the Church of England would protest more strongly against the persecution of Christians abroad and over here.

Recently a seventy-five year old woman in Saudi Arabia was given forty lashes for socializing with her men friends. Christianity is illegal in Saudi – one of our most important middle-eastern allies with whom we do massive trade in weaponry. If you are caught in that country with a Bible, or with the Cross around your neck, you will be arrested by the religious police and thrown into prison.

In Pakistan, a thirteen year old girl was taunted for being a Christian by five Muslim youths who then raped her. The rapists were not charged. Churches are burned down every week in Pakistan. A man is on trial for his life in Egypt for converting to our faith. In China a house church pastor has been slung into prison for utilising superstition to undermine the law. There have been ancient and established Christian churches in the Middle East since the time of St Paul. Now these are breaking up as never before in 2000 years as hordes of Christians try to leave to escape persecution.

In the face of endemic violence from the radical Islamists, the archbishops and bishops have set up an impotent, everlasting talking shop to promote Christian-Muslim dialogue and they issue vacuous communiqués from time to time. The uselessness of this project arises from the fact that it is only “liberal” Christians engaging in polite chit-chat with “moderate” Muslims. All ignored by the militants, naturally. I have some experience here. I was once asked to help the prominent Muslim, Professor Akbar Ahmed who told me, I have more trouble with my own extremists in Bradford than with any number of Christians

Ah but surely all the atrocities are taking place in far off countries of which we know little? Not at all. Let’s come a bit nearer home:

In England a Muslim girl who converted to Christianity from Islam has been removed from the home of her carer after she chose to be baptised. She was placed in a foster home because her father beat her and threatened to send her to Pakistan for a forced marriage. Her carer, who has fostered more than eighty children, did nothing to encourage her to convert

In Sheffield, a primary school head teacher, described by her colleagues and pupils’ parents as marvellous, has resigned after being accused of racism by parents of Muslim students. The accusation comes after she proposed that the school stop holding separate assemblies for Muslim children and replace them with assemblies which would include all pupils.

Also in England, three Coptic Christian children have been placed by social services with a Muslim foster family after their parents divorced. They were originally placed in the custody of the city mosque. The authority has refused to return the children to the custody of the Coptic Church.

And so on. The nurse who offered prayer to a patient, as part of her ministry to body and soul, is sacked. The airline worker who wears a discreet Cross is sacked also. A child was reprimanded for discussing God at junior school. Public libraries have been instructed to place Bibles on the highest shelf – as if they were some sort of pornography likely to deprave and corrupt.

In the face of all these terrible persecutions, it is easy to be seduced by the arguments of those who tell us there is a clash of civilisations between the Christian West and Islam. This is not true. Most practising Muslims desire only to say their prayers and go to the mosque and to have good relations with their neighbours of whatever faith or none. I have not come across many Muslims who object to Christmas decorations or the wearing of the Cross or the public exhibition of the Bible. The truth is more sinister. We are dominated by a secular elite which hates Islam every bit as much it hates Christianity. This elite of atheists and metro-political despisers is also a cowardly elite and dare not attack Islam for fear of getting its corporate throat slit. But it finds it useful to invoke an allegedly outraged Islamic sensitivity in order to persecute the Christian faith.

This secular elite – the Dawkins, Pullmans, Toynbees, Graylings and the BBC entire, targets Christianity because it sees Christianity as the embodiment of those historic and traditional values which, until the contemporary reversal, made this country a place worth living in. A few years ago there was an obscene theatrical show called Jerry Springer: The Musical. In this – broadcast incidentally by the BBC whose Director General claims to be a Roman Catholic – there were some 3500 blasphemies of God and Jesus Christ and many insults directed at The Virgin Mary. Jesus wore a nappy. A case was brought and the programme was judged to be inoffensive.

I’ve written a few musicals in my time. How do you think I would get on if I were to submit my latest proposal to the BBC Mohammed: The High School Years – with Shi’ite nudity and a pulsating rock score?

Why is the Church of England’s hierarchy not out on the streets protesting about the persecution of Christians? Because, shocking as it sounds, many of its members are effectively non-believers who reject the traditional teachings of the church – the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord – and reinterpret them in secular categories as mere metaphors for social involvement. Their ideal image of Jesus Christ is that of a social worker and preacher of the multicultural society. What was it Muggeridge said of the “liberal” Christian view of Christ – that they regarded him as the Labour member for Galilee South...

The Bishops and Synod have sidelined The Book of Common Prayer and The King James Bible and introduced their mindless jogging for Jesus new liturgies and unreadable versions of Scripture. These people are virtually unbelieving in any sense that St Augustine would have understood. For them, Christian doctrine is a sort of long-running metaphor for the social policies of the soft left. And their eschatology amounts only to a slavish acceptance of the pagan fantasy of global warming. The Bishops and the Synod have also accommodated the church to the secular social agenda which gnaws away at the fabric of the family and public life like a moth fretting a garment.

The law of the land says we must not discriminate – except in favour of secularism. Did you know it is an offence to teach Christianity in schools as something that is true – though the 1944 Butler Education Act assumed it is true? Christianity now must be taught only as one among many religions. The only way this can be done is from the secular perspective. This is atheism by state decree.

The plain fact is that Europe, and particularly our nation, was formed out of Christian values. The secular assumption nowadays is that you can remove Christianity and all the other good things will stay in place. They won’t. If Christianity goes, the lot goes with it T.S. Eliot saw the way things were going more than sixty years ago when he wrote:

An individual European may not even believe that the Christian Faith is true, but what he says and makes and does will all spring out of this history of European culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.

The appalling truth is that our civilization has developed a culture of self-hatred, a death-wish of which the present assaults on Christian freedom are only to be expected. As in St Augustine’s day, the repression of freedom is accompanied by the tawdriest and lewdest entertainments and public spectacles. What a falling off there has been. We inhabit the electronic, techno-digital version of the bread and circuses of Augustine’s time. The celebration of low life in mass entertainments such as Big Brother. The debauched worship of celeb-trash. But a serious civilization and culture can overcome any amount of aggression from external enemies. It cannot, of course, survive its own suicide

Christianity in Britain today is under severe persecution. And it will get much worse. I do not resent this persecution. I welcome it. For it will weed out the pseudo-Christians, the wimpish bishops and the caved-in Synod. By persecution we discover who our true friends actually are. Persecution? Bring it on, I say. We will stand for what is good and right as Christian men knowing whose subjects we are. And if there should come the day when we are murdered by the unholy alliance between the Islamist terrorist and the secular commissar, then so be it. For the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

What I am saying in today’s blog is no mere airing of my personal prejudices. I am only quoting what I have read. And this is what I have read:

They shall deliver you up to be afflicted and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated for my name’s sake…rejoice and be exceeding glad, for so persecuted they the prophets that were before you.

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20 October 2011 3:28 PM

Last year the cathedral said it generated £8.25m from commercial activities, or an average of £22,600 a day.

This total included entrance fees from 820,000 paying visitors. And for selling kitsch in its shop. And yet its canons have pretended to be on the side of the anti-capitalist riff raff who have caused such an obstruction and blot on the landscape by the cathedral steps.

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A week is a long time in cathedral politics. Last Saturday the left-wing sympathising cathedral authorities welcomed the anti-capitalist demonstrators camped outside to come into St Paul’s and Canon Dr Giles Fraser asked the police to 'move on.' Ah but this was all before the Canons recalled that the cathedral itself is not immune against capitalist influences. They charge £14.50 for visitors to enter and look around. A nice little earner. But visitor numbers have halved since the demonstrators set up their tents. And takings at the cathedral shop have diminished. So the socialist canons, faced with the choice between maintaining their impeccable and oft-stated left wing principles and losing money, obviously found there was no alternative but to ditch the principles.

St Paul’s is hugely privileged – some might say a micro-capitalist enterprise of its own. Whereas all the ordinary parish churches in England are taxed exorbitantly by diocesan authorities through what is variously known as the Diocesan Quota or the Common Fund, so far as I can discover St Paul’s pays nothing. My two City churches, by contrast, between them pay £75,000pa though this tax. And the demand rises every year. This is a burden borne by the congregation, many of whom give sacrificially to ensure their parish church can stay open. Vicars are constantly browbeaten by diocesan authorities and threatened with dire consequences if the Quota is not paid.

The cathedral Canons are under no such strictures. They are thus privileged. For example, St Paul’s employs a huge staff. It has been able to clean and restore the stonework at a cost of £40million. And if the enjoyment of privilege is something that is bought by cash, then the cathedral is part of the capitalist system. No wonder they have asked the anti-capitalist protesters to move on.

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19 October 2011 11:50 AM

So it is reported that 'Tory rebels' are to stage a revolt over Dave’s refusal to allow a referendum on our relations with the EU. But I confess to some confusion. I always thought a rebel was some sort of dissident, someone who disagreed with the main theme. I would therefore have thought that a Tory rebel was someone who was not really a Tory but who pretended to be one. Like Ted Heath, for example. Or Geoffrey Howe. Or Michael Heseltine. Or indeed like Dave himself.

Now it seems a Tory rebel is anyone who is a real Tory.

The next question is that of whether there are any real Tories in the House of Commons? If there are, then they must, by all truly Tory principles, defy Cameron’s three line whip against a vote on the Europe question and, if that brings down the government, so much the better. What are the people of Britain gaining from this shambles called the Coalition? A general election fought on the issue of the corrupt, decadent and ruinously expensive expensive EU would be the first honest and significant debate we have had in this country for decades.

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18 October 2011 12:21 PM

The distance between the sublime and the ridiculous is sometimes only that between one page in the newspaper and the next.

On the so called “art” pages of a national newspaper, I saw, on the right hand side, that famously glorious painting by Vermeer, The Lacemaker. It is a miraculous picture: the intricacy of the composition – the woman’s hands, her concentrated attention – matches the exquisite occupation, lace-making, in which the subject is engrossed.

On the opposite side of the open page there is something unspeakably banal called Double Runner by Joe Bradley, a preposterous geometric diagram in grey, blue and red which might have been produced by any youngster at the playgroup. It fetched a record price for the artist of £79,250.

How many times do we have to blow the whistle on this sort of rubbish in order to encourage the “artists” who churn it out to desist?

Let us get one thing clear: the stuff produced by such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst has nothing to do with art and everything to do with advertising and making money. Hirst buys a doll from a high street shop. He gets someone else to make a gigantic model of it and sells it to Saatchi for, what was it? a million quid. Or you see such atrocities as Gormley’s, Angel of the North, dangerously distracting motorists on a northern trunk road. I am reliably informed, by the way, that up north this monstrosity, this gargantuan specimen of sheer ugliness, is known as The Geordie Flasher.

A mile from where I live is the national sacred shrine to pseudery and bad taste called Tate Modern. And to think, this dump used to be a perfectly serviceable power station. It is full of what they call “installations” – such as a pretend artist’s workshop constructed, as a kid on Blue Peter might do, out of polystyrene. However, someone – as a joke? – had placed a real Coca Cola can on top of this pretentious nonsense: so naturally it had to be removed on account of its “inauthenticity.” But when everything is inauthentic, how do you make such a judgement? If all the money is counterfeit, how do we discern a real five pound note?

Well, it was in Tate Modern that I created my little bit of havoc – call it Mullen’s Disinstallation, if you like. I ignored the piles of junk lying around everywhere and the faces of the blundering tourists looking as if they were interested in “art.” I drew an attendant’s attention to a fire door: “Look at that magnificent installation of a fire door!” “Oh no, Sir” said the attendant, swiftly and politely correcting my great ignorance, “that’s not an art-work; it’s a real fire door.” But I persisted, “Oh do come off it! How can you pretend that a piece of construction so beautiful and finely wrought is not a work of art?” I began to walk up and down the room between the lines of trash, drawing other visitors’ attention to the fire door as I went: “Look at the exquisite line. The way that the handle is fixed on one side rather than the other. Notice the courageous bold lettering FIRE DOOR. Only a genius would have thought to do that lettering in red. Run the palm of your hand over the surface and feel the texture of the metal. Sense, if you will, the existential fire-doorishness of this fire door!”

In the end, I had to be restrained. The attendant called his colleague and they protested that I was “making a nuisance of myself.” I protested in return that, far from making a nuisance of myself, my mini-lecture was my own personal statement of artistic integrity; my very own installation in fact.

I must say, though, that that debauched tribute to modern taste, Tate Modern, does afford access to one supreme work of art. If you stand on the second floor landing and look out across the Thames, you can see St Paul’s Cathedral in all its glory.

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14 October 2011 10:54 AM

Here is the news we’ve all been waiting to hear. It is announced – by our so-called government – that men may now be allowed an extra fifty-five calories each day, and women an extra one hundred and thirty-nine.

The first thing that strikes me about this particular piece of odious idiocy is its fastidious precision: the ladies, you notice, are allowed one hundred and thirty-nine extra calories – not one hundred and thirty-eight or one hundred and forty. I suppose if one fat lady were to eat an extra one hundred and forty-one calories, it would kill her, or at least make her unfit to be in charge of a bicycle.

Ah but this is only the bare bones, so to speak. I must be more precise. Professor Terence Stephenson, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the permitted increase amounts to “sixteen dry-roasted peanuts per day per person.” Nuts to you too, Prof.

What we should notice about this tosh is that it is all the result of constant and diligent research by “a government advisory committee” over many years. In other words, people are actually being paid to make these assessments and declare ex cathedra the exact amounts we should be permitted to eat. And, if they are being paid, then we the tax-paying public are paying them. And there I was thinking we’re in the depths of economic crisis when we all ought to be cutting out needless expenditure. Can you think of anything less needful for the national well-being than a committee of health professionals talking nuts?

Well, it is laughable and so I suppose the polite thing to do is to enjoy the joke. Except it isn’t a joke. It is an example of control-freakery, to be more accurate of statism – that is of the mindset which has dominated western culture for the last seventy years or so that the government knows best.

They admitted it themselves in the 1940s when they created that great white elephant the NHS and spoke about interfering with our lives “from the cradle to the grave.”

“Take no thought for what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink.“ said the Lord Jesus Christ. But our socialist establishment knows better than the Son of God and insists we eat five pieces of fruit and vegetables each day and that we don’t drink more than what amounts to the whiff of the barmaid’s apron.

So long as we don’t break the law, what the hell has it to do with the government how we live our lives? I thought we were supposed to be living in a free country – which must mean, at least, that everyone is at liberty to go to hell in his own way.

The reality is that there are highly-funded quangos – what about that “bonfire of the quangos” you promised us, Dave? – which seek to regulate every aspect, of our daily lives. And behold the days will come when no man may scratch his own bum, but must apply (with the appropriate documentation) to the commissar for bum-scratching who will come round and do the job for him.

I had hoped that necessity, in the form of the economic crisis, would at last persuade us that the nanny state – actually, the iron fist of corporatist control – would be abandoned. Instead it gets worse. The only way Dave proposes to set alight the bonfire of the quangos is by setting up another, larger, quango to oversee the pretended conflagration.

The abolition of state socialism is the first essential step to our economic recovery – and, even more importantly, to the restoration of common sense and decency in public life.